What is oil, why do we cook with it, and why do things taste so much better with it?
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Our body is designed to absolutely LOVE rare nutrition. Salt, Fat, Sugar in the wild are all VERY rare. In the last 1000 years we essentially have been able to hack the food chain and overload our brains. So we LOVE sugar, fat, salt because in nature they are so rare, so if our body spots them we need to consume as much as we can BECAUSE in history we never knew when our next cache of these rare nutrients will show up. Our genetic evolution / dopamine response hasn’t caught up to the availability of foods we have today so we binge mentally and physically.
Oil, fats, and butters are all energy storage molecules used by living things.
Everything tastes better with love, which could also just be whatever form of energy you can get at the moment..
Oil is a molecule made by plants. We cook with it because we need fats (which includes oil, butter, meat fat, etc). They taste good bc they’re high calorie, so early humans who enjoyed the taste of fats were better fed and therefore survived long enough to reproduce (basically, they taste good bc they’re really, really good for you in a survival scenario- same for carbs)
for everyone saying *oil is fat* that is correct, but what is fat? fat, and oil (and yes, crude oil also) are long chains of carbon molecules. this means two important things for why we cook with it and why it’s delicious.
the long chains of carbons are really attracted to each other, which makes its boiling point very high. so it can cook food quickly, and caramelize the surface of food which also makes it delicious
also, the structure of densely packed carbons makes oil very energy and calorie dense. this is why it can make a car or jet engine fly. it also supplies your body with lots of energy. we’re programmed to find these types of energy-dense foods delicious.
Oil is fat and fat is the 6th basic taste after sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and savoriness (umami).
Surprised nobody has mentioned Maillard reactions yet.
Sure, humans crave oil. But we don’t chug sunflower oil or eat sticks of butter. There’s far more to cooking than just presenting oil or salt or whatever on a plate.
Maillard reactions occur when sugars and proteins are heated. Oil gets hotter than water before it evaporates, allowing the food to get hotter as well. So roasting or frying vegetables results in very different flavours to boiling or steaming them. Most (though I admit not all) would say a fried potato tastes better than a boiled one, and the same largely holds true for vegetables, starches, meats, and fish.
Maillard reactions are what cause the colour changes when foods turn brown and crispy. New molecules are formed (such as caramel) that provide flavours absent from raw or foods cooked at lower temperatures (such as boiling and steaming). Indeed, you could argue the whole ‘beige food’ thing has its roots in Maillard reactions, since those foods are predominantly produced by frying or roasting in hot oil, which improves flavour but also reduces nutritional value while raising calorie content.
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Oil provides a lubricant between a pan and the heat, transferring that heat more efficiently to the food thus creating more even browning. It also prevents that crust from sticking to the pan, ruining your meal and your pan. It imparts luxurious flavor to your food, as its calorie density is craved by our bodies.
Fat is flavor. A saying in the restaurant industry.
Our tastebuds evolved over 15000 years or so to enjoy the taste of fat due to its high and dense nutrient value and ability to give us energy. Food was scarce back in a day before farming when we were hunter gatherers. So we needed a lot of energy to move about this beautiful world we call home to run down our prey and cover large amounts of distance to get to where the food grew. Foods with high amounts of fat are good for this kind of life style because they would give us the energy we needed to continue to live so biology decided, might as well give us a positive signal to the brain when we eat it as a reward.
I deep fried some chicken tenders in canola oil yesterday and they were great. I rolled them in egg yolk with freshly cracked pepper and then I rolled them in Louisiana seasoned crispy chicken batter mix. Best chicken tenders I’ve ever made.
Chicken tastes the best when it is fried.
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